


nor love

by ygrittebardots



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Backstory, Childhood, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-02
Updated: 2014-09-02
Packaged: 2018-02-15 20:02:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2241645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ygrittebardots/pseuds/ygrittebardots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time someone calls him a bastard, Jon Snow is five years old. Jon - for all that he takes pride in being a quick learner and is already besting Robb in arms training - does not know what the word means. From the look on the stable boy’s face, however, and the disgust in his voice as the word falls from his lips, Jon knows immediately that it’s nothing good.</p><p> </p><p> <i>Or: The complete history of a high lord's natural son.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	nor love

**Author's Note:**

> Ages correspond to the show instead of the books - in this case, it just made for better storytelling.

The first time someone calls him a bastard, Jon Snow is five years old. Jon - for all that he takes pride in being a quick learner and is already besting Robb in arms training - does not know what the word means. From the look on the stable boy’s face, however, and the disgust in his voice as the word falls from his lips, Jon knows immediately that it’s nothing good. 

He doesn’t ask Maester Luwin what it means during morning lessons, nor Ser Rodrick during training that afternoon, nor Old Nan when she comes to collect him and his brother for their supper. It’s not because he doesn’t think they’ll know the answer, but because the way the boy had spat out the word had frightened him, and while there are many people that Jon looks to for wisdom and guidance, there’s only one he trusts to protect him from this new kind of danger he does not entirely understand.

Father goes very still when he asks, and immediately he worries that he’s done something wrong. But when he tries to retract his words, tries to take back the question and insist he does not need to know, Father hushes him and runs a large hand through Jon’s soft black curls, smoothing them back from his face as the child looks up at him tentatively with solemn grey eyes.

“Where did you hear this word?” he asks quietly, but Jon can hear traces of something deep and tired - and perhaps angry, and perhaps a bit sad - and hesitantly tells him about the stable boy, the new one from the villages to the west who is Mikken’s nephew. 

“Will you send him away?” Jon asks nervously, unsure if he wishes the answer to be yes or no. The older boy frightens him, but Mikken makes beautiful blades, and Jon worries that if his nephew is sent away - guilty of a crime Jon does not understand or no - he will not want him and Robb playing in the forge anymore, dreaming of the weapons they will someday wield.

Father sighs heavily, and lifts him into his lap. At five years old, Jon is on the verge of feeling much too grown up for such things, but for the moment he is glad for the familiar comfort of Father’s scratchy beard, the boiled leather of his tunic, the steadying warmth of his large hands around his small shoulders and caught in his hair as he pulls Jon close against him and kisses the top of his head.

“No, Jon,” says Father at last. “I will not.”

This is how Jon comes to understand what it means that he does not have a mother. 

This is how Father comes to explain - in the most basic of terms, for grown as he might feel, he is still a very young child - what a bastard is, and that he is indeed one. 

As he speaks, Jon can feel the missing puzzle pieces of his world shifting slowly into place, despite the fact that he did not even realise they were missing before now. Why Lady Catelyn is Robb and Sansa and the coming baby’s mother but not his. Why she showers them in hugs and kisses and sweets, yet only speaks to him when she must, and never with any warmth. Why he was not allowed to sit at the high table with his brother on Robb’s nameday. Why he is called Snow.

What this does not explain is why Mikken’s nephew had used the word with such hate, as though it were the lowest of insults, but in truth he has all but forgotten the older boy as his father speaks in careful, measured words, giving him reasons and answers to all the things he never thought to question.

Jon Snow is five years old the first time he asks his father who his mother is, and later he will not remember Ned Stark’s first excuse not to give him the truth.

 

 

A few months later, not long after the white ravens are sent out to herald the end of winter, Father calls his bannermen to arms and rides out with the king to put down the Greyjoy rebellion. From then on Robb only wants to play Wolves and Krakens in the courtyard and great stone hallways, but Jon’s heart isn’t in it. 

In truth, he has not felt well since the night a week after Father left, when Lady Catelyn came with Sansa to the room they share and held both Robb and their sweet little sister close to her. Jon had pretended to be asleep, but he could see her through a cracked eyelid, dim silhouette in the dying firelight carding her fingers through her children’s matching red hair and breathing in their scent. 

Just the way Father sometimes did with him.

“I want Papa,” Sansa had said in her small, quiet voice, long past baby babble despite being newly two years of age.

“Soon, my little love,” said Lady Catelyn, “He will come home to us so soon.” This had contented both Robb and Sansa, and soon both were drifting off against the enormous swell of her nightdress where the new baby was growing. From his distance, however, Jon had seen what his siblings could not, and the tears that threatened to spill from their mother’s eyes sent a shiver stilling through him that had nothing to do with the fast-fading winter. Curled up into himself in bed, for the first time in his short life Jon had felt very much alone.

Father does come back, in the end, no less than a month after Arya comes thrashing into the world, all red and wrinkles and endless screaming.

Jon, who is standing a little ways back as he has been told, Ser Rodrick’s hand a heavy presence on his shoulder, watches anxiously as Father pulls Robb close, as he lands endless kisses on Sansa’s nose until she squeals in delight, as he takes the new babe in his arms, a soft expression of wonder coming over his normally immovable face despite her squirming and whimpering.

There’s another boy he’s brought with him, an older boy that Ser Rodrick tells him is Lord Balon Greyjoy’s son and he’s going to live with them now. Jon watches as Father claps a hand on the boy’s shoulder and introduces him to Robb, and feels a sickly sort of burning in his stomach, like he wants the boy as far away from his father and brother as possible.

Although he does not understand _why_ he must wait longer even than he already has, Old Nan takes him up to Father’s solar later, and when he scoops him into his arms and right off his feet and lands a whiskery kiss on his cheek, Jon forgets whatever strange jealousies he’d felt and thinks he’d rather have this after all.

 

 

He hasn’t seen Arya yet. Not really. Not up close.

It’s a few days later that Father asks if he wants to hold her, and when he does - so, so carefully, he’s never held a baby before - his heart does a flip on itself. She’s already got a full head of downy black curls and is looking at him as though daring him to pick up his wooden sword and even try to best her.

Jon falls in love in an instant.

 

 

By the time he is ten, Jon understands much more deeply what the word bastard means. It’s a better understanding, anyway, than the cursory explanation his father gave him half a lifetime ago.

Whispers and hushes following him in strange company.

Sitting amongst the lower tables when Winterfell entertains guests.

Pieced-together rumours of wet nurses and Dornish girls with violet eyes because no one will tell him anything to his face.

Standing five paces behind Robb the first time Father takes them to witness an execution, and every time after that.

Knowing that when Bran is old enough, it will be ten.

This is what it means to be a bastard.

More practically, Jon knows that what it really means is that he has no place in the world waiting for him the way it’s waiting for his brothers and sisters. Robb will be Warden of the North someday after Father, and Sansa and Arya will marry lords of their own, and even baby Bran will be a knight or a bannerman with his own keep and wife and holdings.

Jon will inherit nothing. Theon Greyjoy had told him as much when he was seven. Even if he hadn’t, Robb had made it abundantly clear the day Jon had cried out in their games that he was Lord of Winterfell, as he had a thousand times before, and his brother had, for the first time, told him it would never be. He might play at being the Young Dragon to his heart’s content, but for a bastard to inherit the great keep of the North now strained credulity beyond Robb’s imagination.

(No, Jon does not stop loving him then, because now at least Robb knows what he has for a long time already, and it had been said with the kind of childish innocence that Jon has not had in years.)

At the age of ten, he knows what it means to be a bastard, but he also knows what it means that he is allowed proper dulled steel by Ser Rodrick to replace his wooden sword a full two months before Robb is. He knows what it means that Arya will not heed her mother and go to sleep until he has wrestled about the bed with her and told her a story of monsters and knights and warrior women on the backs of dragons. He knows what it means that he can now out-race Jory Cassel when he’s got a properly-matched steed.

It means that, despite Theon’s cutting words and others whispering of depravity and wickedness in the blood, Jon is _good_. 

A good fighter, a good brother, as good a man as any trueborn son to have in your corner. Better, even.

Father had told him and Robb once, one day not so long ago when he wanted to give his sons a proper arms lesson of his own and they had protested his advantage, that big men fall just as quick as small ones if you put a sword through their heart. Jon likes to think that the opposite can be true. That a small man - though maybe he’s thinking of this in a different way than Father meant - can rise just as high if he’s got the right stuff in him.

Jon has talent, and drive, and he strives to be as good and honourable and dutiful as Father even though he’s a Snow, and folk will say there’s bad blood in his veins. He wants to be important in this world. He knows he can do it.

All he needs is an opportunity, someone to say yes.

 

 

Some time before his nameday, Father’s younger brother arrives as an envoy from the Wall - some dispute that’s taken place on Stark lands concerning Night’s Watch business, but Jon hardly cares. The answer’s been staring him in the face for years and he’s hardly thought to notice before now.

Uncle Benjen is quicker to laugh than Father, and carries at least six blades on him, and wears all black, which Jon finds terribly impressive. He grins just like Robb, though, when Jon asks him how old you have to be to become a Brother, and tells him to see a little more of life first.

 

 

There is a small, thin quilt on Jon’s bed. It’s purple and white, faded from time and use, and has been his since before he can remember. Old Nan told him once that he arrived at Winterfell swaddled in it, in the arms of his wet nurse. Sometimes, when he was much younger and Father would once again evade questions of his mother, Jon would curl the quilt around him and press his face against it, breathing in its musky scent. Even as a young child, it was never large enough to cover him entirely, but the feel of it against his skin is strangely soothing, fulfilling a need for physical comfort. Older now, he still catches himself at times running over its worn and breaking seams with questioning fingernails, wondering if it was his mother who tucked him inside at the beginning of the long journey from wherever it is he came from.

The quilt, along with the rest of his bedding and most of his clothes, goes into the great furnace in the kitchens of Winterfell.

He wants to cry, but his throat hurts too much.

Jon is not yet twelve years old when the pox takes hold of him, burning through his body until he can no longer hold down food, until he can barely open his eyes to let Maester Luwin examine them, or hold his own head up long enough to see out the window and know if it is day or night. And so it goes for weeks on end, though Jon can no longer keep track of the passing of time that way. Rather, it is all moments either infinitely stretched out or flashed through all too quickly.

Robb and Arya are there sometimes at the beginning, their anxious faces swimming in his peripheral vision before it turns to a dull murky grey, and he cannot hear their voices. They do not come back. 

Then there is only the crackling roar of the fireplace even when he feels so hot he thinks his skin’s going to melt right off.

Maester Luwin forcing open his mouth to swallow a medicine like black tar that stings Jon’s throat so badly he cries as it goes down.

His father’s drawn and tired face, eyes rimmed red from lack of sleep, and the feel of his fingers sunk into Jon’s sweaty hair, dark tendrils coiling around thick knuckles, his thumb stroking softly across his clammy brow.

The Lady of Winterfell is there once, just once, on the darkest night of all. 

This is when the hallucinations come, when he sees dragon fire and wolves in fields of ice and a great sword dripping with blood. When he turns his head with a whimper and a ragged gasp for breath, the reality of Lady Catelyn appears clearly for but a moment before she invades these visions, too. She is hunched over at her work still, only suddenly her hair is grey and her eyes are empty and the rattled breath comes not from him but her. She looks up at him, then clasps her hands over her finished work - it is not a prayer wheel any longer. It is a star, a true star. Before he can stop it happening, Jon is falling into it, whirling uncontrollably into a bright abyss, and there is a lightness in his head coming from that soft spot where his neck and skull meet and a soft pounding like the lifting of birdwings and then he can _breathe_.

After that night, when he lies in bed recovering but still lacking strength, Robb and Arya visit him the most. He thinks, were they allowed, they’d spend their days at his bedside trying to coax a smile from him, and he loves them dearly for it. Sansa comes once, to wish him well in what sounds like a very well-rehearsed recitation. Bran runs in every now and again to show what he has learned with his little wooden sword, to tell him what new tower footway he’s discovered. 

Father comes to him at least once a day, and though he says little, his hand upon Jon’s cheek is more physical contact than he’s had with him in years.

He has not seen Lady Catelyn since the night his fever broke, but the seven-pointed prayer wheel to gods that are not his own remains in the corner by the window.

 

 

There’s a strange kind of loyalty that exists between Jon and Arya that, while always there, only really comes out when one of them is in trouble. They fight and squabble, and Jon has on more than one occasion been called upon to answer for manhandling the lord’s daughter by those new to the keep who do not know what he is to her. The last time this had happened, Arya - who had started it, honestly, by jumping up on top of him from out behind a massive statue and was now paying for it dearly - had brushed Jon’s hand from the now-tangled bird’s nest that was her hair and declared hotly, “If I wanted to be saved, I would have done it myself. Leave me and my brother alone!”

It’s a loyalty of shared stolen pies from the kitchens, and giving Mikken’s nephew Boyd a terrible itchy rash when he makes one of the scullery maids cry. 

It’s Jon secreting Arya away in his wardrobe when Septa Mordane searches for her lost charge, lest she be sent back to the drudgery of needlework. 

It’s Arya hiding Theon Greyjoy’s precious bow the day after he suggests to Robb that they pin the lost kennel of pups they accidentally released on Jon - an idea Robb is quick to shut down, but she hides the damn thing under her bed anyway.

It’s Jon hugging Arya close and pretending he believes her when she says she’s not afraid of thunderstorms. 

Arya’s hair has long-since straightened itself out from the infant curls with which she was born, but she and Jon are still the only ones amongst their siblings who truly look like Father. Robb and Sansa and Bran and even baby Rickon, with their river-blue eyes and auburn hair, are all Tully. For all that Robb is his best friend, Jon finds it fitting in a way the two outsiders - the boy with nothing to inherit and the lady who would not be a lady - should look the part. He never once dreamed that Arya would so gravely misunderstand the meaning of their physical resemblance.

There comes a day when she is nine and he is fourteen, when she bursts into his chamber unannounced - and that is nothing new - the clear stains of her tears tracking down her dirty cheeks from red-rimmed eyes - and that is unacceptable. Jon pulls her into his arms and kisses the top of her head where he has mussed her dark hair, asks what manner of evil knight could have put his warrior sister in such a state. He is exhausted, has been training with his new sword for the first time all afternoon, but he has time for Arya. He will always have time. 

He could never have been prepared, however, for the question that followed.

“Am I a bastard?” she asks, tiny face twisted in anger and hurt, eyes flashing as though daring him to even think about lying to her.

There has been talk, Jon realises as Arya gazes at him with deep grey eyes that are a mirror to his own, and his little sister has overheard it. Jon’s not stupid nor deaf, he’s heard it a million times with his own ears. It may not be flattering, but they’re not the worst things he’s been called. The black horse of the family, they call him. The dark one. The Bastard of Winterfell.

Arya thinks they mean his face. His hair. His eyes.

Her hair. Her eyes.

His little sister does not know what it means that he is a bastard. It’s not something she’s ever needed to know, something she’s ever needed to tentatively ask Father the meaning of because no one has ever called her that word. No one has ever looked at her as though she has no right to the chamber in which she sleeps, the lessons she learns, the clothes she wears. They never will.

She leaves his chamber some time later, after she has dried her tears and he’s explained to her what it is that she has misunderstood. Arya had challenged him and protested at every turn, defending his own honour to him so fiercely that Jon could not help the warm glow that grew within his chest. They _had_ gotten there, though, in the end. Yet even then, at last understanding her mother’s indifference to her favourite brother, Theon’s blatant preference for Robb, the reason some of the more superstitious smallfolk scurried from Jon’s path, she’d said, “But still, you shouldn’t let them call you mean names!” to which he’d replied with a heavy heart, “They aren’t mean names, little sister. They are true ones. But they are not meant for you.” 

Arya hugs him tightly before she leaves, but she bears a smile of relief in parting and Jon watches her go with a strange squirming in the depth of his gut. A fraternal joy that the little girl he loves so well will never have to know the injustice of being second-tier within your own family. A sadness he had not expected as he imagines Arya on the side of a great precipice, himself on the other, the yawning divide widening the space between them. This is the one thing she will never understand.

 

 

Robb had said he’d know what to do. That with a view like _that_ , he’d have to be both blind and a fool not to. And he does. Father had explained it them a long time ago, at once stern and gentle in the telling, as he is in most things, but that is not the same as really knowing. He’s waiting to know what to _do_ , how to make the horrible thud of his heart stop banging noisily against his ribs, how to shut off the part of him that is screaming at what a bad idea this is.

His brother, he is sure, is bright and confident and smiling with ease and anticipation somewhere in one of the other rooms right now, but he is not Robb. Nor is he Theon, who is at fault entirely for the fact that he’s here in the first place.

No, this is the truth:

Jon is sixteen years old, naked, and afraid.

Well, not so naked, really. His trousers are still on, still laced and everything, but he feels naked as the day he was born under Ros’ gaze, unable to tear his eyes from the heavy curves of her breasts now she’s slipped her dress from her shoulders. All he wants in the world right now is to know what those breasts would feel like in his hands, to know if the delicate skin beneath them is as soft as it looks.

“Nervous, milord?” Ros asks, the white tips of her teeth plumping her bottom lip as she sinks down to her knees in front of him, eyes never leaving his, and for a moment Jon is too distracted - and yes, more nervous than he can ever remember being - to correct the way she’s styled him. Then she smiles knowingly, begins to loosen the front laces of his trousers and says, “Here, now. Let me help you relax.”

And then comes the small voice again, the one that won’t stop whispering of the things he wishes he could set aside. Just this once. Just this one time.

“No.”

Hoarse and quiet, it escapes his lips before he realises.

“No?” she asks, her voice merry and knowing, as if she’s seen a hundred virgin boys flustered and gone red at the sight of a beautiful whore. She probably has. “Poor fella,” she grins, nodding at the bulge at the front of his trousers, “I think he’d quite like me to keep on as I was.”

Jon is mortified at the clearly visible strain of his cock, but still he cannot do it. He wants to. Gods, he wants to. Wants nothing more in the world than to let out the shaking breath he knows he’s holding and tell her yes, keep going, just down there, _please_. But there’s something about this place, and the view of what a woman’s cunt looks like - _really_ looks like - and the little girl he’d seen in the doorway before Theon had pulled him and Robb into the brothel. That’s what had set it off, this fear, this irrational, terrible fear he expects hasn’t even crossed his brother’s mind.

Whores have their moon teas and other such ways, he knows this, but they are no guarantee. Not when his actions are his own responsibility. Full of regret, he exhales through his nose much more steadily than he’d expected to, and sets his jaw. There’s no joy in the small, tight smile he gives her, nor in the shake of his head, but he knows he has no choice.

He’s not going to be responsible for another child called Snow. It’s not a good life for a child.

 

 

The next year, the king comes to Winterfell and Jon is not allowed inside the hall during the feast to welcome him, never mind simply seated at one of the lower tables amongst the squires as he once was. He is older than most of them now anyway. He is nearly a man grown, and can see nothing within the long future that unfurls itself mockingly before him as he strikes the practice dummy in the yard again and again and again, a violent heat covering what he will not acknowledge as terror rising wild and angry within him.

“You told me a long time ago to see a bit more of life,” he tells his uncle when he arrives. “I’ve seen enough.”

 

 

Jon Snow is seventeen years old the last time he asks his father who his mother is.

“The next time we see each other,” he says, “we’ll talk about your mother. I promise.” 

And Jon cannot understand the expression on his face, the one that reads of fear, and inevitability, and a longing sadness etched so deep that for a fleeting moment he thinks he may, for the first time in his life, be about see his father cry. But the look is gone almost as quickly as it came and Ned Stark sheds no tears. Jon feels a fool to think he would, followed by the weight of an old disappointment he is more than used to by now.

So he can do nothing but nod and agree as he always has, before watching Father reign his horse in and turn to join the king’s party as it disappears in the other direction, wishing for a brief, fleeting moment that he had at least touched his arm in farewell.

He never sees his father again.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments, reviews, and fact-checking always appreciated!


End file.
